RBerman

1 hour ago, alxjhnsn said:

LSH commissions are the best commissions. You can see mine here.

Wow, that Curt Swan piece is great. So much more detailed than his usual comics work.

9 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

Some of the Byrne FF #256 pages are already being offered at Panel Page Art.  

Not only offered, but sold, probably for $5000 like the other Byrne FF pages there. And the sold pages didn't even have FF on them. Small wonder the issue is going through the chop shop.

It's irrational for me to be sad for the set to be sold piecemeal. It served its purpose decades ago. But it still makes me sad. A complete Byrne Fantastic Four was sold at the Jim Young auction last month. Will it stay together now? Seems doubtful, because the market has decreed it's worth more in 22 pieces. I wish it weren't so, for no rational reason.

This is the problem of production art techniques getting shoehorned into a fine art collectible paradigm. In the former, attribution is of little interest, whether one or fifty people had a hand in the final published piece. In the latter, attribution is everything. A talented artist who reproduces a masterpiece stroke-by-stroke has simply committed forgery, if he lists the original artist's name first (or only) as a selling point.

22 hours ago, comicartcom said:

because pressing is 'restoration'. Period. Just flattening a bow may not register as much, but what about fixing a spine roll? Eliminating small dents in the paper?

Restoration is the act of returning something to it's original state, or improving its current state.

Period

Why do collectors frown on restoration? If the damage was incidental (e.g. dented paper) then undoing the damage returns the work to its original form. Obviously some restoration is more intrusive than others.

2 hours ago, Will_K said:

Scarlet Witch by Chris Rich-McKelvey (last name is hyphenated)

See??  It works !!

Wow, that is quick service! I am impressed. I couldn't find any published work, just pin-ups. I did find his employment as janitor though.

https://www.fpm.iastate.edu/maps/buildings/building.asp?id=13

21 hours ago, AnkurJ said:

This would be a good idea for an ongoing thread!

Well... how about this thread? I have one that I've asked about in a couple of places, but no one could place it. May be an unpublished artist. Probably not worth much.  Piece is below, as well as the signature glyph. Can anyone place it?

People are all over the map for collecting. More seasoned collectors may hold out for an example of prime Kirby. Others may be happy as a clam to get even a late, sub-prime Kirby piece. I wouldn't have purchased "Kublak sketch, undated" if a page of The Pact were easily available and affordable. But it's not, so I got what was available.

Never give up.

Never surrender.

Back to the original post... does anyone know whose collection was being auctioned by Profiles in History in December? It's the one in which Frank Darabont bought the Wrightson Frankenstein for $1.2 million.

90s, era of the tiny head... I blame Liefeld, but Art Adams too.

In cast anyone wants to see some up close shots of various parts... I see a small area on the left foot, more obvious on the photo than with the naked eye, which looks like a bit of erasing. Other areas show a bit of underlying sketch.

30 minutes ago, glendgold said:

To the OP's question: do you have the Kirby Checklist? https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=123_139_145&products_id=640&zenid=fea62e08e65dd7d5b4415b9b2d6e6b23

I find that it really helps track down oddball work.  If you want to make the bigger investment, get the update: https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=95_97&products_id=1361&zenid=fea62e08e65dd7d5b4415b9b2d6e6b23

Professor Kublak - including this sketch - shows up there. I don't see anything to make me suspicious about it (though I'm not 100% sure what's going on at the bottom - is he turning invisible? Did Jack just not finish?Did something get erased?).  It's a cool piece. I know some long-time Kirby fans who were interested in it.

I did not know about this book but have now ordered it, thanks. If the sketch is in the book, then at least that supports the idea that Kirby did draw a sketch which looks just like the one I bought. Hopefully the very one that I bought.

Kublak's powers do not appear to include invisibility, so I assume the fading left leg is just for effect/unfinished. It doesn't look erased. Here's his apperance in Phantom Force:

5 hours ago, ESeffinga said:

Comics is littered with dudes reaching high. Go back and read my responses in that Jim Lee thread about the commission prices from Lake Como.  OA collectors ask artists to shut up when they talk about wanting a percentage of future sales as their work increases in price over time. But we also don't want to pay them a premium when they are trying to sell their work today? That's trying to have it both ways, IMO.

 

I mean, artists can ask. But they too are trying to have it both ways if they want to sell the art for one price now and get a cut of profits from future resales. Whoever bears the risk of trading liquidity for art will also reap the future rewards of appreciated value, if any. There are certainly creators holding on to some or most of their work anticipating a future bonanza, and that's their right.

Thank you, Grapeape. I'm particularly interested in Thibodeaux's thoughts about the art quality seen here compared to, say, Super Powers. I know Thibodeaux was privy to Kirby's Phantom Force pencils in the period in which this pin-up would have been produced. How does it compare?

Yes, my newbie take is that sketches can't be trusted, which is really too bad since they're good for the artist (more income) and good for the fan community (new art with potentially interesting new poses and character combinations). But they're too easily subverted by the unscrupulous to fleece the gullible (a group which may include me). For those seeing this thread without the benefit of the decades of knowledge alluded to above, here are some relevant direct links:

https://ohdannyboy.blogspot.com/2011/10/original-art-stories-mystery-of-jack.html

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/10/19/greg-theakston-sothebys-and-the-great-jack-kirby-scam/

https://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/2011/10/23/re-shame-on-you-danny-boy/

I purchased two pages (one Hellraiser by John Van Fleet, and one from Marshall Rogers' "Safe Streets" from Bizarre Adventures) in which the text balloons and and captions are on a piece of tracing paper taped to the top edge of the original art. The tracing paper is not pristine, with some cracks and folds, but the underlying art is fine. Obviously leaving it "as is" preserves both pages most reliably, but then the art pages are quite obscured. Is there an accepted way to separate the pages and then store the text page so the art can be seen? The three options are "cut the tape" or "fold the tracing page behind the art page" or "never mess with original art."

This thread makes me a bit queasy. Last month, I was led to the Cool Lines page from Comic Art Fans. I inquired about a New Mutants page that had an actual price listed, not just "Inquire." I got back an email with a listing of many New Mutants pages avaialble for sale, with prices. An impressive collection. The email price for the page I was interested in was five times what the web site said. Not the first time a web site has failed to reflect actual available art and price, but still a little annoying. I gues the market is in flux enough that large collections are difficult to keep updated prices on the web?

Also, some of the pages were listed by their page within the published issue instead of sequential art pages, and a couple of the descriptions did not match what I knew the contents of the page in question to be. An email exchange cleared that up, and I ended up buying two non-splash pages ($700 and $1350 for pages 4 and 19 respectively) from New Mutants #10, a personal childhood favorite by Sal B and Mandrake. Got a reasonable discount on shipping for buying two at once also. Still, stories like this make me leery of looking for more in their admittedly impressive collection. And leery of buying non-published pages in general.

New collector here, just getting my feet wet in the last couple of months. The thread about the fake Shuster got me a little spooked. Last month at the Profiles in History action of "a distinguished collector," I picked up a pin-up purported to be by Kirby of his late (late 80s/early 90s) character Kublak. It came without CoA or details of its origin. The page is 14x7.75 inches; I cropped the white sides off the image below. I assume that at this point it would be impossible to prove that it is Kirby's work, but does anything about it cast doubt?